The Government of England Part 6

[Sidenote: The Prime Minister.]

Until 1906 the Prime Minister, like the cabinet itself, was unknown to the law,[68:1] but the position has long been one of large though somewhat ill-defined authority. It has grown with the growth of the cabinet itself; and, indeed, the administrations of the great Prime Ministers, such as Walpole, Pitt and Peel, are landmarks in the evolution of the system.[68:2] We have, fortunately, from two of the chief Prime Ministers in the latter half of the nineteenth century, descriptions both of the cabinet and the premiers.h.i.+p, which are authoritative;[68:3] and although they do not add a great deal to what is popularly known, they enable us to state it with greater confidence.

At the meetings of the cabinet the Prime Minister as chairman is no doubt merely _primus inter pares_. His opinion carries peculiar weight with his colleagues mainly by the force it derives from his character, ability, experience and reputation; but apart from cabinet meetings he has an authority that is real, though not always the same or easy to define.

In the first place the Prime Minister has a considerable patronage at his disposal. Subject to the limitations imposed by political exigencies, he virtually appoints all the members of the ministry. The ecclesiastical offices also, from the bishoprics to the larger livings in the gift of the Crown, are bestowed on his recommendation; and so as a rule are peerages and other honours; and he has a general presumptive right to nominate to any new office that is established under the Crown.[69:1]

[Sidenote: His Supervision.]

He is both an official channel of communication and an informal mediator. The duties of the Prime Minister, if one may use the expression, surround the cabinet. He stands in a sense between it and all the other forces in the state with which it may come into contact, and he even stands between it and its own members. Matters of exceptional importance ought to be brought to his attention before they are discussed in the cabinet; and any differences that may arise between any two ministers, or the departments over which they preside, should be submitted to him for decision, subject, of course, to a possible appeal to the cabinet. He is supposed to exercise a general supervision over all the departments. Nothing of moment that relates to the general policy of the government, or that may affect seriously the efficiency of the service, ought to be transacted without his advice. He has a right to expect, for example, to be consulted about the filling of the highest posts in the permanent civil service.[69:2] All this is true of every branch of the government, but the foreign relations of the country are subject to his oversight in a peculiar degree, for he is supposed to see all the important despatches before they are sent, and be kept constantly informed by the Foreign Secretary of the state of relations with other powers.

The extent to which a Prime Minister actually supervises and controls the several departments must, of course, vary in different cabinets. One cannot read the memoirs of Sir Robert Peel without seeing how closely he watched, and how much he guided, every department of the government.[70:1] A score of years later we find Lord Palmerston lamenting that when able men fill every post it is impossible for the Prime Minister to exercise the same decisive influence on public policy;[70:2] and recently Lord Rosebery has told us that owing to the widening of the activity of the government no Premier could, at the present day, exert the control that Peel had over the various branches of the public service.[70:3] It is certain that a Prime Minister cannot maintain such a control if his time is taken up by the conduct of a special department; and this, combined with some natural recklessness in speech, accounts for the strange ignorance that Lord Salisbury displayed at times about the details of administration, as in the case when he excused the lack of military preparation for the South African War on the ground that the Boers had misled the British War Office by smuggling guns into the country in locomotives and munitions of war in pianos.[70:4] It has been usual, therefore, for the Prime Minister to take the office of First Lord of the Treasury, which involves very little administrative work, and leaves its occupant free for his more general duties.[70:5]

[Sidenote: He Represents the Cabinet.]

The Prime Minister stands between the Crown and the cabinet; for although the King may, and sometimes does, communicate with a minister about the affairs relating to his own department, it is the Premier who acts as the connecting link with the cabinet as a whole, and communicates to him their collective opinion. To such an extent is he the representative of the cabinet in its relations to the Crown that whereas the resignation of any other minister creates only a vacancy, the resignation of a Premier dissolves the cabinet altogether; and even when his successor is selected from among his former colleagues, and not another change is made, yet the loss of the Premier involves technically the formation of a new cabinet.

Unless the Prime Minister is a peer he represents the cabinet as a whole in the House of Commons, making there any statements of a general nature, such as relate, for example, to the amount of time the government will need for its measures, or to the question of what bills it will proceed with, and how far the lack of time will compel it to abandon the rest. The other ministers usually speak only about matters in which they are directly concerned. They defend the appropriations, explain the measures, and answer the questions relating to their own departments; but they do not ordinarily take any active part in the discussion of other subjects, unless a debate lasts for two or three days, when one or more of them may be needed. They are, indeed, often so busy in their own rooms at the House that it is not uncommon, when a government measure of second-rate importance is in progress, to see the Treasury Bench entirely deserted except for the minister in charge of the bill. But the Prime Minister must keep a careful watch on the progress of all government measures; and he is expected to speak not only on all general questions, but on all the most important government bills. He can do this, of course, only in the House of which he happens to be a member; and the strength of his all-pervading influence upon the government depends to no slight extent upon the question whether he sits in the Lords or the Commons.

As the House of Commons is the place where the great battles of the parties are fought, a Prime Minister who is a peer is in something of the position of a commander-in-chief who is not present with the forces in the field. He must send his directions from afar, and trust a lieutenant to carry them out. In such a case the leader of the House of Commons stands in something of the position of a deputy premier. He is, of necessity, constantly consulted by his colleagues in the House, and he can, if so disposed, draw into his own hands a part of the authority belonging to the head of the cabinet. As Mr. Gladstone remarked, "The overweight, again, of the House of Commons is apt, other things being equal, to bring its Leader inconveniently near in power to a Prime Minister who is a peer. He can play off the House of Commons against his chief; and instances might be cited, though they are happily most rare, when he has served him very ugly tricks."[72:1] It is certainly true that the Prime Ministers who have most dominated their cabinets, and have had their administrations most fully under their control, have all been in the Commons. It may be added that a high authority has declared that "no administrations are so successful as those where the distance in parliamentary authority, party influence, and popular position, between the Prime Minister and his colleagues in the cabinet, is wide, recognised and decisive."[72:2]

[Sidenote: Relation of the Ministers to One Another.]

Not only does the Prime Minister stand above and apart from his colleagues, but they do not all stand upon one plane. The influence of a minister depends upon his personal force, but it may be affected by the office that he holds, and perhaps by his nearness to the Prime Minister himself; for although there is no formal interior junta, or cabinet within the cabinet, yet the Premier is apt to take counsel informally with other leading ministers, and if he is a masterful man those who can command or win his confidence have the better chance of shaping the policy of the government while it is still formless and malleable. The cabinet, moreover, does not always act as a whole. It sometimes appoints committees to consider special subjects, and indeed it has an old and well-established practice of appointing committees to prepare important government bills.[73:1]

[Sidenote: Joint and Several Responsibility.]

It is commonly said that the ministers are severally responsible to Parliament for the conduct of their own departments, and jointly responsible for the general policy of the government. Like many other maxims of the British Const.i.tution, this has the advantage of being sufficiently vague to be capable of different interpretations at different times. With the growth of the parliamentary system, and the more clearly marked opposition between the parties, the joint responsibility has in fact become greater and the several responsibility less. The last instances where a single minister resigned on an adverse vote of the House of Commons were those of Mr. Lowe, who retired from the vice-presidency of the Committee on Education in 1864 in consequence of a vote charging him with improper mutilation of the reports of inspectors, and Lord Chancellor Westbury, who resigned in 1866 on account of a vote censuring his grant of a pension to a registrar in bankruptcy charged with misconduct.[73:2] If at the present day the cause of complaint were a personal error on the part of the minister, he would probably be brought to resign voluntarily before there was a chance of his resignation being forced by a hostile vote in the House; and if the question were one of policy, the government would, save in very exceptional cases, a.s.sume the responsibility for that policy, treating a hostile vote as showing a want of confidence in itself. The majority in the House of Commons, on the other hand, while it may question, criticise and blame a minister in debate, is reluctant to permit a vote of censure upon him which is liable to involve the fall of the ministry.[74:1]

Each minister is responsible to the cabinet for the conduct of his department. He is constantly meeting with problems which may involve criticism in Parliament, and where a mistake might entail serious consequences for the whole government. In such cases he must decide how far he can a.s.sume to settle the question in accordance with his own opinion, and what matters he ought to bring before the cabinet. He must not, on the one hand, take up its time in discussing trivialities, and he must not, on the other, commit his colleagues to a course of action which really involves general policy. If in doubt he can, of course, consult the Prime Minister; but in spite of this privilege annoying blunders must inevitably occur.

A minister naturally has charge in the cabinet of the business relating to his own department, but how far he takes an active part in other things will depend upon the interest that he feels in them. Lord Palmerston, for example, when Secretary for Foreign Affairs, took, as his letters show, little interest in anything else; but when he became Home Secretary he took not only an active but a leading part in directing the foreign relations of the country. This he was fully ent.i.tled to do, because the cabinet is both an a.s.semblage of ministers at the head of the separate branches of the administration, and a council of state which must form a collective judgment upon the questions submitted to it. A minister is, therefore, justified in pressing his views on any subject, whether connected with his own department or not; and on no other basis could collective responsibility be maintained. The practice is particularly marked in the case of foreign affairs, which usually form a large part of the business at the meetings.

[Sidenote: The Treasury and Other Departments.]

It is not only on questions of general policy, brought before the cabinet, that differences of opinion between ministers may arise, for there are many matters of current administration that affect more than one department. In such cases the ministers concerned confer together, and if they cannot agree their differences must be submitted to the Prime Minister, and ultimately to the cabinet. There is, indeed, one department which is continually brought into contact--one might almost say conflict--with all the others; that is the Treasury. Any vigorous branch of the public service always sees excellent reasons for increasing its expenditure, and proposes to do so without much regard for the needs of the other branches; while the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is obliged to find the money, must strive to restrict the aggregate outlay. If he did not, the expenditure of the government would certainly be extravagant. As a preliminary step to the preparation of the budget the Treasury issues in the autumn a circular to the other departments asking for estimates of their expenses during the coming fiscal year. These are made up in the first instance by the permanent officials, and then laid before the parliamentary head of the department, who revises and perhaps reduces them. When they reach the Treasury they are scrutinised by the permanent officials there, and if anything is not clear, an explanation is sought from the department concerned. The estimates are then submitted by the Treasury officials to their parliamentary chiefs, and if there is an objection to any item it is the duty of the Financial Secretary of the Treasury to confer with the head of the department whose estimates are in question.[75:1] If the parliamentary head of the department does not agree with the Financial Secretary he may go to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and if they cannot settle the matter they must appeal to the Prime Minister and as a last resort to the cabinet. Being placed in such a relation to his colleagues, it is not unnatural that the Chancellor of the Exchequer should often differ with them. As Gladstone notes in his diary in 1865, "Estimates always settled at the dagger's point."[76:1] Like other differences in the cabinet, these occasionally come to light, especially when they have been so sharp as to cause the Chancellor's resignation.

Lord Randolph Churchill resigned in 1886 because the cabinet insisted upon appropriations for the Army which he opposed; and Sir Michael Hicks-Beach has told us recently that had it not been for the fact that his protests against the growth of expenditure were received with indifference he might not have quitted the office.[76:2] One cause, moreover, of the final resignation of Mr. Gladstone--who although not then Chancellor of the Exchequer, always looked upon matters from the Treasury standpoint--was a difference of opinion between him and his colleagues on the question of the cost of national defence.[76:3]

Whatever the policy of the cabinet at any moment may be, the scale of expenditure is ultimately determined by the feeling in the House of Commons, and this in turn depends upon the state of public opinion.

Except for a few short periods of extravagance, the seventy years that followed the close of the Napoleonic wars were marked by a decided tendency in favour of economy. People felt the pressure of taxation, worried little about the condition of the Army or the Navy, and had no strong desire to increase the expenses of the government in any direction. Latterly the tendency has been reversed. The country has felt rich; there have been a series of alarms about national defence, and at the same time the general growth of paternalism has brought in a desire for improvement and expenditure in many ways.

[Sidenote: The Cabinet and the Ministry.]

The ministry is composed, as has already been pointed out, of an inner part that formulates the policy of the government, and an outer part that follows the lines laid down; the inner part, or cabinet, containing the more prominent party leaders, who are also holders of the princ.i.p.al offices of state, while the outer part consists of the heads of the less important departments, the parliamentary under-secretaries, the whips and the officers of the royal household. All of these persons are strictly in the ministry, and resign with the cabinet; but the officers of the household have, as such, no political functions, and do not concern us here. The heads of departments without seats in the cabinet have become, with the increase in size of that body, very few. By far the greater part of the ministers outside of the cabinet are the parliamentary under-secretaries, who have two distinct sets of duties, one administrative and the other parliamentary. Their administrative duties vary very largely, mainly in accordance with personal considerations. Some of them are really active in their departments, doing work which might fall upon the parliamentary chief, or upon the permanent under-secretary, while others have little or no administrative business; but in any case the real object of their existence is to be found on the parliamentary side. Whatever duties, parliamentary or administrative, may be a.s.signed to an under-secretary, he is strictly subordinate to his chief, who retains both the authority and the responsibility for the decision of all questions that arise in the department;[77:1] although an active under-secretary in the Commons may sometimes attract more public notice than his real chief in the Lords.

It is commonly said that as a minister can speak only in the House of which he is a member, there must be two parliamentary representatives for every department, one in each House. This, however, is not strictly true. Going back, for example, over the period of a generation, we find that the Foreign, Colonial and Indian Offices have practically always been represented in both Houses.[78:1] The other great departments have, of course, always been represented in the Commons;[78:2] but the War Office and the Admiralty have not always been represented in the Lords.

The Board of Trade has often, and the Local Government Board and Home Office have usually, had no spokesman of their own there;[78:3] while all the parliamentary officers of the Treasury invariably sit in the Commons. The system of under-secretaries, therefore, is by no means always used in order to give a representative to the department in both Houses. It not infrequently happens that both, or in the case of the War Office and the Admiralty all three, representatives sit in the House of Commons. An under-secretary, even when he sits with his chief in the Commons, is, however, a convenience for those departments which have a great deal of business to attend to, and many questions to answer.

Moreover, the large number of under-secretarys.h.i.+ps has the advantage already noticed of including within the ministry a considerable number of lesser party lights who have not achieved sufficient prominence to be included in the cabinet, and yet whose interest in the fortunes of the ministry it is wise to secure.

[Sidenote: The Cabinet and the Privy Council.]

One of the great changes in administrative machinery that has taken place in the civilised world within the last two hundred years is the subst.i.tution of an informal cabinet composed of the heads of departments, for a formal governing council of members who had themselves no direct administrative duties. The form of the old council has survived in England under the name of the Privy Council, but its functions have become a shadow. The Privy Council never meets as a whole now except for ceremonial purposes. Its action is, indeed, still legally necessary for the performance of many acts of state, such as the adoption of Orders in Council, and the like; but this is a formal matter, requiring the presence of only three persons, who follow the directions of a minister, for all cabinet ministers are members of the Privy Council. The Council does real work to-day only through its committees. Of these the most notable is the Judicial Committee, which sits as a court of appeal in ecclesiastical and colonial cases, and will be more fully described in a later chapter. Other committees, such as those on trade and on education, have at times rendered great service to the state, but the more important administrative committees have now been transformed into regular departments of the government. It is by no means certain, however, that the Privy Council may not, through its committees, become in the future an organ by means of which important political functions, especially in connection with the growth of the empire, will be evolved. At present it is mainly an honorary body. Its members are appointed for life, and bear the t.i.tle of Right Honourable; and, indeed, of late years members.h.i.+p in the Council has been conferred as a sort of decoration for services in politics, literature, science, war, or administration.

[Sidenote: Future of the Cabinet.]

Mr. Gladstone was of opinion that the cabinet had "found its final shape, attributes, functions, and permanent ordering,"[79:1] and so far as its relation to Parliament alone is concerned, this may very well be true; but Parliament is gradually ceasing to be the one final arbiter in public life. The cabinet is daily coming into closer contact with the nation, and what modifications that may entail we cannot foresee. It may be observed, however, that while the members of the cabinet present a united front, and say the same thing in Parliament, they do not always say the same thing to the country. The ministers agree on a policy before announcing it in Parliament, but they are not always in the habit of taking counsel together about the speeches that they make upon the platform. Mr. Chamberlain's sudden declaration of a policy of preferential tariffs in his speech at Birmingham in 1903 is only an extreme example of what sometimes occurs. Absolute unanimity may not, indeed, prove to be so necessary to the ministers in order to maintain their authority before the people as it is to hold their position in the House of Commons.[80:1] But no serious changes in the structure of the cabinet are probable so long as parliamentary government continues in its present form; and it is too early to speculate on the changes that may occur if the parliamentary system itself becomes modified under the pressure of political parties acting in a democratic country.

FOOTNOTES:

[53:1] Parker, "Sir Robert Peel," III., 496.

[56:1] This is the opinion of two of the most prominent Prime Ministers of the century. Ashley, "Life of Palmerston," II., 330; Morley, "Life of Walpole," 159; the latter representing, as has already been pointed out, the views of Mr. Gladstone.

[57:1] For an example of the difficulties that arise on this score, _cf._ Morley, "Life of Gladstone," II., 628-29. Lord Rosebery, who, after being Prime Minister in 1895, was left out of the next Liberal cabinet in 1905, had taken himself out of the field by saying that he could not serve in a ministry whose chief held the views on Home Rule that Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had expressed.

[57:2] _Cf._ Parker, "Sir Robert Peel," II., 486-89; III., 347-48.

[58:1] Todd, "Parl. Govt. in England," 2 Ed., II., 189-90.

[60:1] If the post of Lord Privy Seal is not needed for this purpose, it is given, without salary, to the holder of some other office.

[60:2] The President of the Council had in the past a somewhat undefined authority in connection with the Committee of the Council on Education, but this committee has now been replaced by a Board.

[61:1] The Law Officers present occasional exceptions.

[61:2] As in the case of Mr. Birrell in the present ministry, a man who is not in Parliament may, of course, be included in a new cabinet in the expectation that he will win a seat at the impending dissolution.

[61:3] Eng. Const., 1 Ed., 228-30.

[63:1] _Cf._ Todd, "Parl. Govt. in England," II., 405, note _w_.

[63:2] This happened, for example, in 1825, when Palmerston, Goulburn and Copley (all three in the ministry) were three out of the six candidates for the two seats for Cambridge University. Bulwer, "Life of Palmerston," I., 153 _et seq._

[64:1] One cannot read Mr. Morley's "Life of Gladstone" without being struck by the frequency of such differences. One feels that in his twenty-five years of life in the cabinet Gladstone must have expended almost as much effort in making his views prevail with his colleagues as in forcing them through Parliament.

[64:2] In Gladstone's cabinet of 1880-1885 the practice of counting votes was complained of, as an innovation. Morley, "Life of Gladstone,"

III., 5.

[65:1] This obligation has been said to rest upon the cabinet minister's oath of secrecy as a privy councillor (Todd, 2 Ed., II., 83-84, 240).

But this would seem to be another case of confusion between the law and the conventions of the const.i.tution. Although the permission of the sovereign must be obtained before proceedings in the cabinet can be made public (_cf._ Hans., 3 Ser. CCCIV., 1182, 1186, 1189), yet in fact the duty of secrecy is not merely a legal obligation towards the sovereign which he can waive under the advice, for example, of a ministry of the other party. It is a moral duty towards one's colleagues, which ceases when by lapse of time, or otherwise, the reason for it has been removed; and the secrets must be kept from other privy councillors, the leaders of the Opposition for example, as well as from the rest of the world.

Sometimes sharp discussions have occurred on the limits of the permission given to reveal what has taken place at cabinet meetings.

This occurred after Mr. Chamberlain's resignation in 1886. Churchill, "Life of Lord Randolph Churchill," II., 85-86.

[66:1] _E.g._ Hans. (1886), 3 Ser. CCCIV., 1181 _et seq._, 1811 _et seq._, and (1904), 4 Ser. CXXIX., 878, 880; Cx.x.x., 349 _et seq._; Cx.x.xI., 403 _et seq._, 709 _et seq._

[66:2] _E.g._ Rep. Com. on Civil List, Com. Papers, 1901, V., 607.

[66:3] There is some interesting gossip about instances of this kind in MacDonagh, "Book of Parliament," 337-49.